Partyline restart handling is now properly fixed

We have just finished an important reliability improvement in Mediabot v3.

The goal was to make sure that when an IRC restart is triggered from the Partyline, the bot does not kill the whole process. Instead, it should drop the IRC connection cleanly, keep the Partyline alive, and reconnect properly.

What was happening

At first glance, the restart flow looked mostly correct:

• the restart command was accepted
• the IRC QUIT was sent
• the Partyline stayed connected

But live testing showed that something was still wrong: the bot was not always becoming usable again on IRC after the restart.

Root cause

The issue turned out to be very concrete:

the main periodic timer used for runtime checks and reconnect handling was being created, but in the initial startup flow it was not actually added to the loop and started.

So the reconnect logic existed, but on the first run it was not really alive.

Fix

Once the main timer was correctly attached to the loop and started in the normal startup path, the whole restart chain finally behaved as intended.

Result

Mediabot can now:

• accept .restart from the Partyline
• send a clean IRC QUIT
• keep the Partyline session alive
• reconnect to IRC correctly
• rejoin channels and become usable again

Why this matters

This is the kind of fix that is not spectacular from the outside, but makes a huge difference in real operation.

A bot that can restart its IRC side cleanly without losing its admin interface is simply easier to trust, easier to maintain, and much more pleasant to operate.

Validation

The live test suite now passes fully:

79/79 tests passed

That is a very satisfying result, and a good milestone before moving on to the next parts of the project.